Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Search for 100 Earths

Episode Date: February 26, 2020

Yale astronomer Debra Fischer has spent decades hunting for exoplanets. Now she leads the 100 Earths project that includes the Lowell Observatory and astrophysicist Joe Llama. Debra and Joe join us for a conversation about this search for worlds that could be like our own. There’s big space news in this week’s edition of The Downlink at the top of the show, and Bruce Betts takes us on his weekly tour of the night sky, though it’s the pre-dawn sky that may hold the most wonder. Try your hand at the space trivia contest! Learn more and enter the contest at https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2020/0226-2020-debra-fischer-joe-llama-100-earths.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Search for 100 Earths, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Deborah Fisher of Yale University has spent decades in the search for exoplanets, often relying on new instruments to help reveal these worlds. Now she's using a spectrometer of unparalleled sensitivity to find Earth-sized planets that could host liquid water. Deborah is in close partnership with the Lowell Observatory and astrophysicist Joe Lama.

They'll join us in minutes. It's another poetry festival on What's Up this week as Bruce Betts leads the search for the human who has spent the most time in space alone. We're just days away from unveiling the terrific new version of The Downlink. The Planetary Society's weekly space news briefing will be enhanced with beautiful space images and cosmic factoids you'll use to amaze your friends. Or at least get them to say, huh, I didn't know that. In the meantime, you can still find Editorial Director Jason Davis's work at planetary.org slash downlink, including these highlights from the current edition. NASA's Mars 2020 rover has made it to Florida safe and sound.

It's now being prepared for the rocket that will carry it to the red planet in July or August. Testing of parachutes for the ExoMars 2020 mission, that includes the Rosalind Franklin rover, has been delayed. The European Space Agency-led effort is getting perilously close to the opening of that launch window. The International Space Station has yet another visitor. This time, it's a Cygnus cargo spacecraft that arrived with more than three and a half metric tons of supplies, experiments, and new station hardware. It will turn into a garbage truck in May, hauling trash from the station as it burns up on reentry. hauling trash from the station as it burns up on reentry. China's Yutu 2 rover continues to amaze as it explores the dark side of the moon in its 15th lunar day.

Kidding, kidding. That'd be the far side, naturally. We've talked several times about the Breakthrough Listen initiative, the huge SETI, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Project, has released two petabytes, that's petabytes, of collected data. You citizen scientists out there can help analyze it. Look for the link in the February 21 edition of the Downlink at planetary.org slash downlink. Deborah Fisher was first heard on our show 11 years ago. Back then, only, ha, only, only about 300 exoplanets had been discovered, and Deborah's partnership was responsible for more than half of those discoveries.

She had already been on the hunt for many years, and she still is as we sail through 2020. She's now Eugene Higgins Professor of Astron astronomy at Yale University, where she leads an effort called 100 Earths. It's another partnership, this time including the famed Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. That's where astronomer and astrophysicist Joe Lama was when the three of us talked a few days ago. Deborah and Joe, welcome to Planetary Radio. Deborah, in your case, it's welcome back to Planetary Radio. Joe, very happy to have you join us on the show for the first time. Thanks. It's great to be here.

Yeah, great to join you. Let's start with the key question in, I guess, all of this, what will lead to the rest of our conversation. Thousands and thousands of exoplanets have now been discovered, not just discovered, but confirmed. Why is it still just such a tiny handful that are Earth-sized and in the habitable zones around their stars? Deborah? Well, every detection technique, it turns out, is biased against detecting planets like the Earth. For the radial velocity method that we use, the planet is tugging on the star and causing it to orbit a common center of mass. So for the Earth, the Earth tugs on our sun and causes the sun to move

with just a puny 10 centimeters per second, and it completes just one orbit in a year. This is a problem that I would say for sure I saw coming 20 years ago. All my colleagues saw coming 20 years ago. We thought that we would find planets with the radial velocity method harvesting the big planets first, and then we would hit a wall with our detection technique and never be able to detect the small Earth-like

planets. But that's also when some of us began planning for how we could build an instrument that would have the sensitivity to grasp those really truly Earth-like planets. It sounds like you've said that the folks using the transiting method, that they've run up against the same, I hate to call it a wall, but I guess I will. I'm going to also let Joe weigh in on this, but the bias with the transit technique is that the probability of finding a transit falls off linearly with distance from the star. So planets that are close to their host stars are possible to detect. And if you have extremely high photometric precision, as the Kepler mission did, then you can detect Earth-sized planets, but in very close

orbits. Finding a true analog of Earth that might have liquid water on its surface is just, it's an improbable transit. That's right. Just as Deborah said, the reason, you know, Kepler found thousands of planet candidates, but the likelihood of finding an Earth at one AU from a star the size of our sun is just so unlikely that it's really not that surprising that Kepler didn't do that. I think where missions like Kepler really shine are finding low mass planets around low mass stars. So finding Earth-sized planets in shorter orbits around low mass stars, which then could potentially be in the habitable zone. So that would seem to fit the world that we were just talking about on this show two or three weeks ago,

TOI 700 d. It's small, but so is its star, and it is pretty close. That's right. And so planets like that were really the forte of missions like Kepler and now the TESS mission as well. And so expect to see many more planets like that coming out of the TESS mission. Let's start talking about what you said you began to think about 20 years ago, you and colleagues. Is the result of that thinking the work that is underway now on the so-called express spectrometer? Yes, it is indeed. We started wondering what was limiting our precision. And we knew that we had a lot of things that we could control. And there are things that are beyond our control as well. But let's start with the things that we can control. We can control the instrument. We can build an instrument that is much more stable. And part

of the work that I did actually with help from Planetary Society about 10 years ago, starting about 10 years ago. I remember it well. Yeah, fiber optic feeds to the spectrograph. The fiber optic cables will scramble the light that's coming in so that we have this beautifully smooth illumination of the spectrograph. And that was a giant step forward. The other giant step forward was the evolution of devices called laser frequency combs. And these are fundamentally tied to measurements using global positioning satellites to give us a precision in the wavelength calibration

that has just never been seen before. A few of these big advances, technical advances, have really allowed us to drill down the precision. And now with Express, we're able to measure a precision with our instrument that is something like four or five centimeters per second. Oh, my God. I just I've heard these kinds of figures before, but they blow me away. Yeah, me too. It's truly amazing. me away. Yeah, me too. It's truly amazing. Joe, you're newer to this field than Deborah,

but it sounds like you're just as fascinated. I guess you just said that you are also amazed by the precision that has been achieved that you still hope to improve on in the coming years. Oh, absolutely. Everyone always, everyone always asks astronomers, you know, how do you get your head around the sense of scales and things in the solar system and in the universe? And, you know, when Deborah just says very casually there

that we're measuring five to 10 centimeters per second, I can't get my head around that. We have a star that's so far away and we're able to measure it so precisely. It's truly amazing. I'm really fortunate to be involved at this point. I think it's just, it's so cool.

If you were to express that in terms of wavelength, since that's what you're looking at, right? It's a spectrometer and you're looking at this tiny change in the wavelength of the light coming from the star. It's a Doppler thing, right? How much of a change are we talking about in wavelength? It's a nice 2 over 500. Let's see. In terms of the pixel shift, it's about 1,000th of a pixel. In terms of wavelength, let's see. I have to work that out. So it's delta lambda is equal to lambda times V over C. So if you guys talk about something else. Okay, no problem.

So the measure that you use most commonly is this number of centimeters that you can see in the shift. It's a velocity shift. So it's centimeters per second. So it's, yeah, it's a velocity that we measure. The actual change in the speed of the star, in what we see as the velocity of the star, as it's affected by the gravity of this little world that's circling it, right?

Right. Deborah, we'll have to talk more broadly about the 100 Earths Project. And I'm looking at the website that is there at yale.edu. And we'll put up links to all of this on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. But to talk a little bit more about Express, it obviously builds on what you've done before. That's what you've said. Is it just refinement?

Are there new innovations that we'll see in this new spectrometer? There are a list of, I would say at least a dozen new innovations. So these are things that haven't been done in spectrographs before. Some of them may feel like they're small improvements, but have really, it's the combination of everything working together that's allowed us to get this very high precision. So we, when designing the spectrograph, the metrics that we used for the optical design changed. We used the fiber scrambler. We used the orbital velocities. We developed new techniques for flat fielding, new analysis pipelines.

It's been a long, a long road of just trying to find and control every single error. And as my poor students get tired of hearing me say, there are 100 things that can go wrong. And if we only get 99 of them right, it's not good enough. We literally have to control everything. I, in fact, see a slogan on the 100 Earths website that says, here's the hard lesson, everything has to be right. Then you list five points on this webpage, the things that you're working on with Express. The last of them, maybe this is what you were starting to, what you just barely mentioned there, understanding the stellar noise, the noise from the star itself, which could

get in the way of your detection of these worlds. Do I have that right? That's absolutely right. When we're looking at a star and measuring its velocity, the surface of the star is pulsating, coming out towards us and falling back in. And there are spots rotating on the surface of the star and all sorts of strong flows on the surface of the star. And it's just incredibly difficult to disentangle what fraction of our errors have come from, like with old previous spectrographs, what fraction of the errors came from the stellar noise, as we call it, the velocities from the surface of the star, and what fraction came from our instrument. So I just always believed that until we were able to control the errors in our instrument at the level of a few centimeters per second, we wouldn't have

the fidelity in our data to finally be able to tackle this last problem of figuring out where the contribution of velocities from the surface of the star start to kick in. Fortunately, I've been working for the last three years with a statistician here at Yale and her graduate students and postdocs. And there are a lot of sort of bread and butter techniques and statistics that actually allow us to, that can be applied to this problem. So we're starting to make progress, but that's only been possible now that we have an instrument that delivers this incredibly precise data. Working with a statistician and her students, it sounds like this is very much a multidisciplinary challenge. It absolutely is. And I would say it's a challenge that's so difficult that all of our

former competitors are now my friends and my colleagues, and we're all working together because there was a time in this field, in the sort of late 90s, through the mid 2000s, or maybe even a little later, when there was just intense competition between the various teams to race and we had webpages, whodiscoveredthatplanet.org. And at this point, I think there's a sense that we've all worked really hard and now it's us against the star. I love that. We've redrawn the boundaries of our collaborators to include everybody who used to be our competitor is now working together. I mean, I will do anything to help any of them.

And they've been amazing in helping us as well. You will have this exquisitely sensitive spectrometer, and that's wonderful, but it has to be hooked up to a telescope. Joe, I suppose that's partly where you come in, right? Can you tell us about the telescope that Express will be working with? Absolutely. So Express is hooked up to Lowell Observatory's Lowell Discovery Telescope. And so it's a 4.3 meter telescope that was commissioned back in the 2013, I think it was. Yes, 2013. And so it's a state of the art telescope. And so when you couple such a modern facility with such an amazing instrument, you know, you have a recipe for success. It's a great telescope in a great location. And then as you say, as you add in

Express, you just, we're able to just beat down on all these systematics that are preventing us from getting to the precision that we need. And so, yeah, it's just, it's a great combination of tools. Deborah, what is this partnership between Yale and Lowell? What does it mean for 100 Earths? It's amazing because the Lowell astronomers are just phenomenal, and the technical staff is incredible. It is a beautiful, beautiful telescope. So when I first imagined building Express,

I visited four or five observatories to try and find the perfect telescope. The Lowell Discovery Telescope was the one that was just clearly, clearly the best telescope. And I can tell you more about why, but I think a big part of it is the team. And I just feel incredibly lucky that we were able to partner with them. Joe, I'm looking forward to paying you a visit, I hope. I have to go to a wedding in Flagstaff. I think it's early in this coming summer. I have not been to Lowell since the Planetary Defense Conference was held at the nearby campus of the University of Arizona. And I'm sorry, Northern Arizona University.

I think I had my schools mixed up. Sorry, NAU. It's a wonderful place to visit, isn't it? Oh, it really is. It's a wonderful mold of the historical element. You know, Laurel is where Pluto was discovered, but also the modern research side. So we have these wonderful telescopes from the early 1900s. And then we couple that with the brand new, you know, cutting edge research facilities. It's an amazing place to work and it's a beautiful place to come visit. I highly recommend it. Kudos to Percival Lowell for getting it all started.

We forgive him for that business with the canals. Absolutely. No one's perfect. Deborah, let's broaden this out a little bit. Tell me about the 100 Earths Project,'s broaden this out a little bit. Tell me about the 100 Earths Project, which Express is just a component of. Right. I think with the realization that the NASA Kepler mission, which was using a completely different technique looking at transiting planets, Kepler told us that statistically, almost every star had planets,

and that small planets were far more common than the big gas giant planets. When you hear that as an astronomer, you realize that you're guaranteed a success. If you can build an instrument that has the precision to detect the planets, the planets are there. There's no like anxiety about, you know, if I build up, will they come? They are there waiting for us. And so we imagine that if we could look at 100 stars, which is about the size of our sample, that we should be able to find planets around most of them with the radial velocity method. Most of these stars are stars that I've looked at for the last 20 years of my career using telescopes either on Mount Hamilton, the Lick Observatory near San Jose, California, or the Keck Telescope. So these stars are our old friends.

They are the closest stars, our nearest neighbors to the sun. And now with the precision that we have, we're beginning to uncover the first signals from some of these stars. I'll be right back with astronomers Deborah Fisher of Yale and Joe Lama of the Lowell Observatory. Where did we come from? Are we alone in the cosmos? These are the questions at the core of our existence. And the secrets of the universe are out there, waiting to be discovered.

But to find them, we have to go into space. We have to explore. This endeavor unites us. Space exploration truly brings out the best in us. Encouraging people from all walks of life to work together to achieve a common goal. To know the cosmos and our place within it. This is why the Planetary Society exists. Our mission is to give you the power to advance space science and exploration. With your support, we sponsor innovative space technologies, inspire curious minds, and advocate for our future in space.

We are the Planetary Society. Join us. We're back with Deborah Fisher and Joe Lama, continuing our conversation about the 100 Earths Project. What is the current status of this effort? And what's the timeline for the future? I mean, can you even begin to project when you might achieve this goal of finding 100, I'll use the term advisedly, Earths? Yep. What we're looking for are planets that were just missed, given the error bars of the old generation spectrographs. The instrument was commissioned exactly one year ago, actually, in February of 2019. We finally had it fully commissioned. data on stars. And with the technique that we use, we have to map out at least one full orbit. And of course, the stars are only visible for part of the year because the Earth is going around the sun, so we lose them in the glare of the sun. But as we're coming around in our second year,

we're going to be confirming some tentative signals that we've already identified. be confirming some tentative signals that we've already identified. How soon do you think, and I'm not saying that this is based on data necessarily, how soon do you think you'll start saying, guess what? We found an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone around such and such a star? Right. That's going to be the hardest question to answer. Will we be able to find an Earth-like planet at the habitable zone? We are still going to be pushing the boundaries and the frontiers. The first thing we're trying to do is to find analogs of the planets that Kepler says exist in great abundance, but we miss them. These are Earth-sized or roughly two times the size of the Earth planets and orbits out to about 200 days.

For that category of planets, we're actually, I would say, we're working on our first paper of a possible publication. I'm a little bit nervous about it because it's about five times the mass of the Earth. Because this particular planet orbits a star that's lower in mass than the sun, the habitable zone moves in closer. But even this one is not quite out there. We're seeing tentatively additional planets in that system. So this is going to take a while. This is, we're going to have to be patient. And our job as scientists is to make sure that the data have extremely high fidelity. That's, I live and die by my data, right? And then once we do that, then the data will tell us the story of what's there.

When you talk about planets with, you know, double the mass of earth or five times the mass of earth, double the mass of Earth or five times the mass of Earth. Are you talking there about are these Neptune, sub-Neptune planets, or are they more in the classification known as super-Earths? I would say that these, and listen to what Joe says as well, but Neptune is roughly 17 times the mass of the Earth. And so a planet that's five Earth masses, I would consider to would consider to be a super Earth. Joe? Yeah, I would agree. I would completely agree. I think one thing that we're finding from Kepler is there's not really this discretization of, you know, this planet is

an Earth. There's a continuous distribution of planets. And I think Express is going to find all of them, all classes of planet. That's an important point, since I think Express is going to find all of them, all classes of planet. That's an important point, since I think using these convenient classification names may have misled some of us into thinking that somehow these planets sort of seeded themselves into certain categories. And it's much more interesting and sounds much more likely that, as you say, it's a more or less continuous spectrum, if you will. Absolutely. And I think that's no more poignant than here at Lowell with Pluto's demotation to a dwarf planet. That makes it no less interesting to study. It makes it no less of an object. But somehow in people's minds, because it's now a dwarf planet, it's not as interesting

a place to study. And that's just simply not true. Yeah, yeah. Something we've talked with many people about, including Alan Stern. Deborah, as you know, the Planetary Society is very proud of this long relationship that has had with you supporting your work for many years, as you said. And I know that there is a project about to begin where we will be trying to contribute to development of Express as well. Can you say a little bit about that and what's involved? Absolutely. And Joe is actually leading, he's the intellectual leader of this new project, using a telescope that looks at the sun to be able to detect the planets that we know are there. It's so cool to have the answer in the back of the book.

You know, every once in a while you want to do that so that you make sure that the techniques that you've sharpened up are really working. This project will use the solar telescope and measure the sun day after day to detect, see if we can detect Venus. That's right. So Deborah's really picked the harder of the two problems to go find the planets around, you know, the other stars, whereas I've picked the easy problem where we know the planets are there. We know what we're looking for. The advantage that the sun gives us is, A, the spectrograph is just sitting idle during the day. So, you know, it's really great that we can almost make 24 hour a day use of the spectrograph. But the other advantage of the sun is we can spatially resolve it.

And so, you know, Deborah's group are working with statisticians at Yale. And one of the things that we can then feed them is spatially resolved data of the sun from other instruments like NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which is constantly taking these really high precision, high resolution images of the sun and feed them sun like a star observations from our solar telescope to try and figure out exactly what the signatures of activity are, and try and remove those from the data that Deborah takes in the night to search for these hundred Earths to try and tease out that tiny signal from an Earth-sized planet. So you can just redirect the light when morning comes from the DISCOVER telescope to make it come to express from the solar telescope? Absolutely. We downsized from a 4.3-meter telescope to a 70-millimeter lens. I just, this may not be particularly relevant, but I'm just wondering, I mean, obviously you're looking at things that are rather radically different in brightness.

Do you have to take special steps to protect Express when it is looking at the sun? That was definitely a concern. We've put in quite a few neutral density filters, but we are pretty confident we are not going to saturate and damage the Express detectors. We've done a lot of due care there to make sure that doesn't happen. And Joe has the first spectra, actually actually of the sun taken so that we have confirmation that it's all good. That's right. We saw first light back in December and we're hoping to be routinely on sky observing the sun every day, every clear day, which there are many of here in Northern Arizona. Coming, starting hopefully in April, we'll be routinely on sky

observing the sun every five minutes during the day. That's fantastic. And congratulations on that first light. Deborah, back to the project that the Planetary Society will be helping out with, has to do with what, replacing some fiber optics? That's right. So we need to have the fiber optic feeds for the laser frequency comb use something called a photonic crystal fiber. It's a surprisingly small, like maybe about 10 inches of fiber. But it's technically very difficult to manufacture. So that bit of fiber costs $20,000.

And to be able to feed both the solar telescope and the night use of Express with the laser frequency comb, we need to have that other fiber. Well, what specifically is so special about this fiber? That makes it so much more expensive than the line that goes from my flat screen TV to my stereo system. Right. Because this fiber is doing a whole lot of work. It's taking a pulsed laser and cascading that pulse so that very precisely we get an emission line

roughly every 10 pixels on our spectrograph cascaded down from an infrared wavelength of laser all the way through the visible bandpass for Express. I guess that gives us an idea, this is just one component of Express, of just how difficult it is to put together an instrument with this kind of precision, and yet you're working with it, Joe, on a daily basis, or will be. Absolutely. It's mind-boggling. I'm so grateful to the team at Yale for all their decades of hard work that have led up to this point. And I feel a little bit bad that I'm coming in late to the game and just, I get to use this instrument

to do amazing science. Yeah, it's such a great opportunity. Deborah, my guess is that you don't fault Joe for arriving at the party late, because I know that you have always been so supportive, not only of your own students who work directly with you there at Yale and at previous institutions, but of bringing up youngsters, sorry, Joe, hardly a youngster, but of encouraging this next generation. Absolutely. No, I feel lucky to have Joe on the team. He's an amazing scientist. And we just couldn't do all of the science, you know, without the whole team. The team is amazing. And I would say every once in a while, I look at Express and I wonder, what was I thinking that I imagined I could ever do this? It's just, thank goodness it worked out.

It is daunting. Debra, you've been at this for decades now. Are you as excited as ever about finding other worlds and especially worlds that could be like our own? Absolutely. Oh, my gosh. It never gets old. And especially since these stars, I feel like are my old friends. I mean, I've been looking at them for 20 years and looking at them and missing the planets that are now beginning to emerge, which is just a spectacular feeling.

Jo, I know we'll put up your personal webpage as well, as well as the page that you have at Lowell. And it talks about your work, your interest in the magnetic fields of stars and how that affects our ability to find exoplanets. Or do you want to restate that? Oh, sure. So yeah, one of my main research interests is actually in the magnetic fields of an exoplanet. And so one of the advantages of a planet having a magnetic field is that it enables the planet to hold on to its atmosphere. And so it's just one of the possible requirements for a planet to be considered habitable. Being able to detect exoplanetary magnetic fields

is going to be an important step in the characterization of a potentially habitable world. We're talking about what could be one of the differences anyway, between what we see of Mars now and what the Earth still is, that we have that nice field to protect us from the sun. Exactly. That's exactly right. And Deborah, that takes me exactly where I wanted to go as we close this out. Finding these worlds in their habitable zones, that's one thing. What about looking for the signs of life using spectrographs, spectrometers that are going to

be sensitive enough to show us things like oxygen, methane, and whatever else? Right. We are actually using Express to measure the atmospheres of some planets that are transiting. But the planets that we're able to look at right now from the ground are typically gas giant planets. So they're transiting Jupiters. It still gives us the chance to take our first baby steps, though, into this whole field. And I just finished serving as a community co-chair on a NASA science technology development team for a large ultraviolet optical infrared telescope that we imagine would have a diameter between 10 and 15 meters, would probably be parked far out on the other side of the moon at the second Lagrange point, would have a coronagraph that could null out the light from the star so that we could see image and take spectra of the atmospheres of orbiting planets. So our job right now, the first thing we're focusing on for the next few years is going to be to find the names and the addresses,

the phone numbers of these really interesting planets, and then pass them on so that someday when some version of this telescope design that we worked on for the last four years is built, probably in the 2030s, that the next generation will be able to follow up and see if the atmospheres look like there could be life there. So there is much, much more to look forward to. And while we can marvel at what has been accomplished in this field that didn't exist not very many years ago, I guess there's much more ahead of us. Absolutely. Oh, that's science. Joe, is this a field that you're going to stick with? Absolutely. It's so exciting. You know, how can you not love your job when what you're doing is traveling out to a telescope, observing other stars, looking for Earth-sized planets? It's the coolest thing. Thank you both. This has been a wonderful conversation, and I hope that the hunt goes extremely well.

I look forward to sharing with listeners to this show how they can become part of it through this campaign that the Planetary Society will be running to augment or improve the express instrument that I've been talking about with Deborah Fisher and Joe Lama. Deborah, Joe, thanks very much. Thank you. Time again for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, and he is back near the tail end of this leap year of February to tell us about the night sky. And we've got some great results for the contest that he's

going to provide with some help from me. Welcome. Oh my gosh, it's leap year. That changes everything. All right, I'll just wing it. I'll make adjustments on the fly. Go for it. All right. So evenings dominated by a super bright Venus over in the West. In the pre-dawn, it's not only planets, it's planets all lined up. We've got from upper right to lower left in the Eastern sky in the pre-dawn, you got Mars looking reddish and then really bright Jupiter. And then to its lower left is yellowish Saturn. Kind of neat right now because they're all roughly equidistant and they're all in a line. And I like to remind you, as you know, Matt, the planets all orbit in roughly

the same plane. So they get in this nice line when they're in the night sky. It's like proof or something. But they're particularly lined up in this case. And not a planet and having nothing to do with the orbits of planets. Antares, reddish star in Scorpius, if you follow that line farther up to the right, you'll find another reddish object. That is Antares. There are objects outside of that plane, right? That good old plane, like comets and things like that, right? Oh, there are tons of objects, wacky, wacky objects outside that plane, and even more so as you get to the outer solar system. All the big guys orbit in approximately the same plane,

not exactly. We call it the ecliptic. I'm just not clever enough today to come up with anything to answer that. I'll also mention the dimming of Betelgeuse and Orion, which you can see quite nicely in the evening sky, was the implications were overly exaggerated, perhaps because it's brightening again. It's a variable star, so probably not going supernova. But who knows? Take a look tonight and check it out. I mean, it would put on quite a show, wouldn't it? For our benefit, of course. Oh, it would be fantabulous if the star exploded. Unless you live nearby. Oh, I meant for us. Arthur C. Clarke wrote a story about that once. Lucy Clark wrote a story about that once. On to this week in space history. It was 1966 that two astronauts, the Gemini primary crew for Gemini 9, Bassett and Sea, were killed in a plane crash. So we remember them.

And then 1969, Apollo 9 was launched this week. Quite successful. And we're going to talk more about Apollo 9. Oh, that's great. You're probably going to talk about this, but because it didn't go to the moon, it didn't get the attention of the others, but it did such an important job of getting ready to go to the moon. I'm getting ahead of you. Let's go to the contest. No, let's go to random space fact.

How about that? Man, I should have gotten more sleep. Me too. random space fact. How about that? Man, I should have gotten more sleep. Me too. Random space fact. So as you probably know, Matt, I'm sure you know, the main point of the Apollo 9 mission was to test out the lunar module in space and rendezvous and docking. docking. But also on the mission was the first and only EVA, extravehicular activity, of the EMU, the Extravehicular Mobility Unit. In other words, the life support backpack that was worn by astronauts on the moon. This was the only time they tested it in space when Rusty Schweikert put it on and ducked out of the capsule. And next time it got

used with slight modifications was on the lunar surface in Apollo 11. Rusty Schweikert, friend of Planetary Radio and of the Planetary Society, still around today helping to save the planet, right? He is indeed. He's passionate about planetary defense and protecting the Earth from asteroid impact, as are we. And you've anticipated again, we'll come back to Rusty Schweikert, although having nothing to do with planetary defense. But first, trivia question we ask, who performed the longest solo space flight? How'd we do, Matt? I was very surprised by this, and it has a record that has stood up for a long time.

In fact, How Long is in this week's poem from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild. In June of 1963, the U.S. too outpaced. Valery Bykovsky went in Vostok 5 to space. His mission was supposed to be a solo of eight days, but he came down on number five because of solar rays. Valerie Bykovsky? Yes, Valerie Bykovsky. Bykovsky. Okay, thank you. Bykovsky. Bykovsky.

We've got many other comments about this from our listeners, many of whom were also surprised by this result. Our winner, first-time winner, Matt Walter in Louisiana. He said, a problem with Vostok 5's waste collection system is reported to have made conditions unpleasant in the capsule. Ew. So Valeri was probably just as happy to come back early. Matt, congratulations. You have won yourself a priceless Planetary Society rubber asteroid and a Planetary Radio t-shirt from the Planetary Society store at chopshopstore.com.

You can check out all the merch there. Norman Kassoon in the UK. During the flight, he conducted experiments such as photographing the Earth's horizon and documenting the growth of peas. He was growing green peas in his capsule, apparently. Arnold de Rink in Belgium said that Valery was one of his biggest heroes as one of the guys who managed later, of course, to keep the Mir space station operational with tubes going through hatches, the fire, the loss of specter and its recovery of power after a few spacewalks. MacGyver in space. Laura Dodd in California says he wasn't completely alone the whole time because, did you know this, Valentina Tereshkova came within about five kilometers aboard Vostok 6.

Yes, I did know that. That was the plan. First woman in space. Not quite waving distance, but not bad. Okay, then we get into the silly stuff like this from William Hillier in Germany. He thought that we should count Elon Musk's Starman, who, when he wrote this, had been in space by himself for two years and 12 days. Mel Powell said, au contraire, it may have been Alice Cramden. One of these days, Alice Powell, right to the moon, said Ralph Cramden. And Mark Little,

his first answer, and this definitely would have been the winner if it wasn't fiction like the previous two, Buck Rogers, who spent 504 years in Ranger 3 in suspended animation. I need to be more specific of what I'll accept, I guess. Eson Beglu in Ontario. It was Chewbacca because he flew with Solo in a galaxy far, far away. Not with Solo, just flew Solo. More poetry to finish the day. Martin Hajoski submitted this, he called it not a haiku,

but a haikovsky for Bykovsky from Hajoski. Four days Valeri flew in Vostok alone with Earth, his companion. Finally, John Cowart, friend of the show. He's in Florida, formerly many years with NASA and the Commercial Crew Program. Still very much a spaceman, though, working for aerospace. At first, I thought this query might just be a trick because the old Bruce man is sometimes pretty slick.

So deep into my archives, I burrowed like a mole to find the name of this brave, intrepid soul. First, I looked to Apollo, thinking I might see if a command module pilot named T.K. Mattingly had spent sufficient time about the moon alone to bring me victory and a rubber asteroid to my home. Alas, T.K. was not the one for me, nor was it Gordo, nor Scott, nor even Wally. TK was not the one for me, nor was it Gordo, nor Scott, nor even Wally. No, the name that I needed to bring home the V was just a little old Vostok driver, Valerie Bykovsky.

Wow, impressive rhyming. Great work, John. This could be your second career. We're done with that. What do you got for next time? What was Rusty Schweikert's call sign during his EVA on Apollo 9? Go to Planetary.org. Go somewhere. Go to Planetary.org slash radio contest. All right, Rusty, you can enter if you like. And if you do, and you're chosen by random.org, Rusty, you can win a Planetary Society rubber asteroid. And what the heck?

Another Planetary Radio t-shirt from shopshopstore.com. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about what you would do with a rubber asteroid to help yourself sleep better. Thank you, and good night. That's Bruce Betts. Go enjoy a nice nap. He's the chief scientist of the Planetary Society,

and he's earned that nap because he joins us every week here on What's Up. Come here, rubber asteroid. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. It is made possible by its members who seek out new worlds. Join them at planetary.org slash membership. Mark Hilverder is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Like what you hear?

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